Changes At Our Church

My son loves music! During worship this morning, the worship leader stopped playing the keyboard for 10 seconds to go to the next song and Ben loudly broke the silence with "MO" (more). We also pass around a box of music/noise makers to allow all people to participate in worship. Ben began playing his maraca at least 30 seconds before the worship leader began playing. He was ready to get the party started!

Ryan and I have been a part of Christ the Victor Church, the most recent English-speaking
church plant, since we first moved to Wichita. The church had been meeting about two weeks before we came so we have been here since the beginning.

Recently, it has become very clear that we needed to revisit our vision and the mission of our church and shake things up a little. Our church has so many people coming that we never anticipated or really looked for. We have also gotten quite large and are full to capacity in the home in which we meet (35-40 people each Sunday).

As part of the changes, the leadership team changed. Ryan has been on the leadership team since it began. Another missionary Daren was also on the team from the beginning. I always gave Ryan my two cents about everything (I don't know that it always got back to the team though...ha) and I am sure Tina, Daren's wife, did the same. Tina and I are now officially on the team and two other members have resigned their positions. As two couples with some children have the privilege of having our team meetings over dinner in our homes while our two boys (Daren and Tina's son just turned 1) are strapped in their high chairs! It is definitely a different dynamic and one that I am excited about!

Our first big change under the new leadership team is to find a way to multiply our church. Unlike the status quo of churches today, our vision is to multiply. When we get too big, we multiply and have two churches. When those two churches get too big, they multiply and we have four churches. It is time for our church to multiply.

Tonight we had a church-wide meeting and it was fairly well attended! We talked to the church about our plan to multiply. I think some people were completely caught off guard (even though this has always been our plan) and some people were excited about a change. Now we just have to figure out how exactly to do all this! That is why I am telling you all this - to ask you to pray along with us and with our church that God speak clearly to us about where our church will meet (we have to be out of our current location on November 3 to allow a new missionary couple to join our staff) and how exactly we go about it all. We also are praying for more people from the community! We ultimately want to train indigenous leaders to take over the church and we will move on and start another church!

Ryan has also designed a fabulous new logo for all of the churches that we will plant from here on. All church planted (even some in other World Impact cities like LA) that commit to the vision of Christ the Victor will operate under this logo! He has also compiled what he is calling the Book of Shared Spirituality that is almost a handbook for starting a Christ the Victor Church. Ryan will be published! I think I am way more excited about this than he is. Once it is on Amazon, I will give you the link :) My husband is so incredibly talented!